


walls

by TheImpalaClub



Category: The Umbrella Academy (TV)
Genre: 4 percent, Angst, Canonical Character Death, Drug Addiction, Drug Use, Ghosts, Hurt No Comfort, Like, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, it's Klaus, okay some comfort, what other tags did you expect, yeehaw
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-26
Updated: 2019-02-26
Packaged: 2019-11-05 22:10:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,819
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17927303
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheImpalaClub/pseuds/TheImpalaClub
Summary: there's a lot of things Klaus wrote on his bedroom walls:a list of messages from the dead to the livingconversations between people who don't know how to talksongs being played through a stolen Walkmanhis name"I'm sorry""Goodbye"





	walls

**Author's Note:**

> fuck i LOVE Klaus Hargreeves he's an absolute disaster anyway i've watched the entire show three times already and our lad has a lot of shit written on his walls so here's some content about it. like and subscribe.

Four is seven years old and the ghost in the corner of his room won’t go away.  
He’s tried everything: he plugs his ears and she gets louder, he tells her to go away and she cusses at him, he starts to walk down the hallway to Six’s room and she follows him, and he doesn’t want to make Six deal with her, too, so he goes back, he slams his head against his bedframe, because usually that works, and all he gets is a headache. It’s just past three in the morning; it always is, isn’t it? Everyone else is asleep, except Dad, and he gave up on asking the security camera above his door for help a long time ago.  
Supposedly, he’ll be able to control when they show up, someday. But now, there’s a woman standing by his window with her head on backwards, and he can’t make her go away. Which means he can’t sleep.  
“What do you want?” he whispers, pushing himself further into the opposite corner of his room. As far away from her as he can get.  
The ghost turns her face towards him. The front of her is reflected in the window, and Four can see her wringing her hands. “I never said goodbye to my husband,” she says. Her voice is barely louder than his.  
Four rubs his eyes. He’s not going to be able to do anything like that. Whoever made him, shoved him headfirst into the afterlife, didn’t give him any way to track down the people the dead didn’t get to say goodbye to. But it might make her go away, and then he might sleep for a few hours, and then whatever Dad puts him through tomorrow will be a little more bearable. So he nods like he’s a real messenger and feels around on the floor for the pen he dropped earlier. “What’s his name?”  
“Daniel MacPherson.”  
“Okay, uh…” there isn’t any paper in his room. Academy rules. He uncaps the pen and puts the tip against the wall. “How do you spell that?”  
She tells him. Her hands stop moving so much.  
Four scrawls ‘goodbye’ in seven-year-old handwriting under the name. “I’ll tell him.”  
“Thank you.” She’s already fading away.  
Over the years, the list gets longer. Names and messages written underneath them. Sometimes he feels a little guilty about it, god knows he’s had enough false hope in his life, and giving it to people just to get some peace and quiet doesn’t always sit right with him. But he writes them all down anyway, and sits in his room reading them over and over again.  
When he leaves home, he’s read them enough that he can recite them all to himself. And he does, in time with the music in clubs and his footsteps and heart monitors and ambulance sirens. On the off chance he meets someone in a bar or an emergency room with a name that matches.

 

No one in the Umbrella Academy knows how to talk. Three only deals in rumors and Five talks so much that someone has to put their hand over his mouth to get a word in. But Two has it bad enough that dear old Dad has decided to do something about it. They’re ten and he’s not allowed out of his room (except for missions) until he gets over his stutter. So Four hasn’t seen him in weeks, not counting the foiled robbery a few days ago. He’s not old enough to help, though, and he gets treated badly enough when he’s on Reginald’s good side, so doing what he can doesn’t seem like a good idea.  
But he wishes he could help. So when Two comes into his room in the middle of the night, stands silently in his doorway until he bolts awake, he doesn’t say anything, he just takes off his pajama shirt and throws it over the security camera.   
They sit on Four’s bed facing each other. Quiet. A few times Two opens his mouth like he’s going to try and say something, but he always thinks better of it. Four looks around for… something, the sign language dictionary he’d taken out of Reginald’s library, a pad of paper. All he has is the pen he keeps under his mattress, though. It’s changed colors a few times in the last three years, because they run out of ink or Mom finds them and they’re against Academy rules. He throws the cap across the room and finds a spot on the wall that isn’t covered in magazine covers or supernatural IOUs.   
‘How did you get out?’ he writes. Then he hands the pen to Two.  
‘Broke the camera yesterday. He hasn’t fixed it yet.’  
‘Wish I had thought of that’  
Two takes the pen and throws it towards the space above Four’s door. It slices through the fabric of his shirt and into the camera lens. They both burst out laughing, and don’t stop until Mom knocks on the door.  
He keeps coming in, every night, almost, until Dad fixes the cameras. Even then, he still comes in sometimes, and they write on the back of the door so no one will see them. Eventually they both have their own pens. Eventually they start writing stories together, about Pogo fighting dragons. Four covers them up with posters, but he’ll take them down and read them when he can’t sleep. Eventually Two starts talking, better than the rest of them, even, but he still comes in sometimes, with his pen already uncapped. His walls are covered in conversations, switching between handwriting that’s messy in two different ways. Four writes too big and Two’s letters run into each other too much. By the time they stop, there’s writing from the beginning, from when they were too scared of Dad hearing them, from when the mission had been too close of a call or the training had been too hard, from when Four’s jaw was wired shut. You could start above the headboard and trace your finger through seven years of inside jokes. They do, sometimes, when they’re sure the other isn’t in the house.

 

He’s thirteen and the only things that keep him from screaming all the time are Six and the Walkman the two of them shoplifted the day he got back from the mausoleum. It’s been almost two months. The sound of ghosts screaming his name still fill up all the quiet in Four’s life, and the sight of them drifting towards him fill up all the dark spots. He hates closing his eyes so much that he tries not to blink. It doesn’t work. Six is there, most of the time, his hand on his shoulder or his voice rambling in his ear. Four asks if they can share a room, because every room that he’s alone in for too long starts looking a lot like the walls are made of tombstones and the floor is covered in dried leaves. Reginald glances down the table at One and Three and tells them no, absolutely not.   
So every day at curfew he puts his headphones on, cranks the volume, and waits for the night to be over. Sometimes even that’s not good enough, though, because they’re almost scarier when he can’t hear them. If he closes his eyes, it doesn’t help. He knows that all he has to do is open his eyes and they’ll be there. It’s almost funny: his whole life, ghosts have been real, and he’s been scared, but at least they’d been few and far-between. And the plan had been to lock him in a room full of dead for a week to get him less scared, but now he’s completely terrified all the time, and he’s seeing more ghosts than ever. It isn’t funny, though, when they’re making faces at him in the corners of his eyes.   
Four copies the lyrics of the songs he’s listening to onto his bedroom walls. It’s the worst handwriting that gets immortalized on them, because he’s usually shaking and he has to write fast to keep up with the singing. But it gives him something to look at that doesn’t make him feel like he’s dying. It gives his hands something to do besides claw at his forearms.  
There’s only about ten weeks’ worth of lyrics written down, contained between the windows. After that, Four finds what’s left of the OxyCodone the doctors gave him for his broken jaw. And he doesn’t need to transcribe anything anymore.

 

He writes ‘Klaus Hargreeves’ in block letters, right by the ceiling, like a name makes him any closer to a real person. He writes ‘Diego Hargreeves’ under one of the stories the two of them had made together, and he crosses out the little ‘6’ on his bedframe and writes ‘Ben Hargreeves’. Like names will make any of them closer to real people, any less of the Umbrella Academy, Reginald’s little troupe of supersoldiers, any less scarred and on-edge and screwed-up. They look nice on his wall, though. He uses a pen with pink ink. Then he lights a cigarette.

 

Maybe it’s the fact that there’s enough painkillers in his system to kill a small horse, or the half-a-bottle of vodka he washed them down with, but something’s really not good. He barely makes it from Dad’s bar to the bathroom before puking so hard he thinks his guts might actually have come out. Somewhere in his brain he thinks that that must be the end of it, since his stomach was where all the drugs were, and now his stomach is empty, but as he’s washing his hands he realizes that his fingertips are purple and he can’t see the pupils of his eyes in the mirror, they’re so small. It’s one in the morning; everyone’s asleep, and even if he had access to the phone to call 911, he doesn’t think he’ll make it across the house.   
So he stumbles into his room. There’s so many dead people in there already- one more won’t make a difference. He throws up again, into his trash can, and collapses on the floor. It’s not his first time at the rodeo, he knows that in a few seconds all the oxygen in the room is going to go somewhere else, and all his muscles are going to forget how to do what he tells them to, and reality’s going to fall away piece by piece until finally it’s all just gone, like when Luther kicks the puzzle Vanya’s almost done with across the kitchen floor. But it sure as hell feels like it’s the last time.   
He’s been thinking about how he’s going to die since he was four, and this isn’t any of the options he’s decided on. The running theory has always been that someone in the family was going to off him; that Allison was going to get sick of him and hear a rumor that he jumped off the roof, or that Luther was going to start hitting him one day and he wasn’t going to stop, or that Dad was going to get it through his head that maybe the best way for Klaus to talk to ghosts was to become one himself. This isn’t any of those things. He almost feels bad for them. They all hated him, to the point that it’s almost mean to deprive them of the chance of killing him themselves. Maybe that’s why he writes ‘sorry’ on the baseboard, in black Sharpie, over and over until he can’t move his hand anymore.

 

They’re seventeen, almost eighteen. Well, most of them are almost eighteen, but Ben isn’t. He’s just seventeen, and he’s going to be for a long time. When Klaus opens his bedroom door one day and finds him sitting in his desk chair, both knees bouncing, he’s not surprised. Even though he’s out of his fucking mind, it was inevitable.   
There aren’t any marks on Ben. No signs of struggle. None of the blood that was all over the hallway and got all over Klaus when he found the body. Usually he can tell how someone died when he looks at their ghost. He guesses clean is better than how he should look, which is completely torn to shreds, with half his face and all his ribcage ripped open. If they’d done an autopsy, they wouldn’t have had to make any incisions. There hadn’t been anything left for them to cut.  
“You still doing the message thing?” Ben asks. He’s wearing the hoodie Klaus got him for his birthday last year.  
Klaus glances at the list of names, addresses, phone numbers, and notes that took up half of one of the walls. “Sure, I guess.”  
“Tell Dad I said ‘fuck you.’”  
“Oh, shit, actually, I just retired.”  
“Tell him it’s his fault.”  
“I can’t do that, you know I can’t.”  
Ben blinks a few times and looks down, the way he does whenever Luther is yelling to loud. Or, the way he did. Klaus isn’t sure what tense to use. Past or present, he hates it.  
“Look, I’ll… add it to the list.” He uncaps his pen.

 

He doesn’t have much to pack. It’s not like he’s moving out, really, it’s just that he doesn’t plan on coming back. He knows it’s stupid. Stupid that he doesn’t have a place to stay lined up, and doesn’t have any friends, which rules out the option of couch surfing. Stupid that the only things he’s taking with him are the toothbrush, extra pair of underwear, lighter, and flask that fit in his coat pockets. Stupid that he’s spent his whole life being told he’s going to save the world, he’s special, he’s worth just a little more than everyone else, and he’s leaving home so he can spend the rest of his probably-short life doing whatever he can to stay wasted and hooking up with people just so he has a place to spend the night.   
Stupid. He knows that’s what it is because that’s what Ben keeps telling him it is.  
“You’re an idiot. Diego would help, if you asked him.”  
Klaus stomps the last cigarette in his pack out on the floor. “I’m not going to ask him.”  
“I’ll help, then.”  
“What are you gonna do, run through me over and over until I get so annoyed I get clean?”  
“Don’t put it past me.”  
It’s almost funny. “Joke’s on you, I put up with sixteen years of your bullshit. I think I'm immune.”  
Nothing else is going to fit in his coat pockets, except maybe another pack of cigarettes. He could fit them right next to the wad of cash he got pawning off all the clothes he wasn’t wearing and every piece of original Umbrella Academy memorabilia he could find before Grace figured out what he was doing. It would get him through a month- longer, if he kept up his current eating habits, which consisted of a protein bar every couple days and saying yes every time someone offered to buy him dinner.  
“What if I don’t come with you?” Ben asks, crossing his arms over his chest. Sometimes when Klaus looks at him he can still see the carnage. Now isn’t one of those times, thank christ. He’s got enough on his mind.  
“You didn’t conjure yourself, asshole.”  
“Maybe I did. You can’t do it when you’re high.”  
“You can’t do it at all, you’re the goddamn ghost!”  
Ben starts to say something else, probably something so completely true and angry that it would make Klaus empty out his coat pockets and go ask Diego for help, but Klaus puts his headphones on before the first word comes out.  
He looks around his room, at the writing on the walls. Reginald will probably paint over it; he’ll probably make someone else paint over it. Grace. Mom. He wonders if she’ll read everything while she does it, if she’ll like the stories he and Diego wrote, if she’ll wish he listened to happier music. Then he remembers it doesn’t fucking matter. She’s a robot. And he turns around to leave, but gets a nagging sense of incompleteness that’s so strong he feels like he’ll die before he gets to the front door if he doesn’t do something about it. All the conclusions Dad would write after every experiment must have rubbed off on him. Or else it’s the amount of time he spends with people who have unfinished business. Either way, he rummages through the empty dime bags and burnt-out matches on his desk until he finds a blue pen, and he writes ‘goodbye’ as big as he can, right between a song lyric and a paragraph Diego wrote about a mission five years ago that took a sharp turn to the deep south.  
And then he leaves.


End file.
